


queer melody for a marine

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Sex, Enemies to Lovers (approximately), First Time, M/M, Mysterious Hickey Squeak, Sex Crying, don't ever put sol tozer in a situation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:42:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29796225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: A man’s allowed to change his tune, isn’t he? Based on new lessons learned. A soldier wouldn’t be worth his salt, if he couldn’t adapt to circumstances in the field.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Solomon Tozer
Comments: 11
Kudos: 36





	queer melody for a marine

He pities Mr. Hickey, at first.

The lad is clearly out of place on board _Terror_ : he’s got no friends among the crew, like so many others do, mates from past voyages or cousins from their dockside hometowns. There’s the sea-sickness, gone on far longer than it has any right to; he stumbles about looking green for weeks past anyone else, and with such a complexion already tending towards frailty it seems for a while like he might not make it to Greenland, let alone the Arctic archipelago they’re destined for. It’s enough to make a man pray, seeing the poor caulker’s mate laid so low.

But when Mr. Hickey finds his sea legs—it does happen, and just in time—he shows himself to be a grouser of the worst kind, shamefully lazy and overly given to skiving. Tozer’s pity evaporates like seawater in the sun, leaving behind only a hard crust of salty dislike.

Naturally the ship’s boys fall in with him, all cow-eyed over a man who seems to know everything about anything—not experienced enough to know the dangers of a sea lawyer, and no ABs willing to tell them, not if it’d mean having to deal with Hickey themselves.

Tozer’s never been shy about showing a man he’s not fond of him, especially when the man in question has the constitution to take it. Hickey, he knows now, is as hardy as a barnacle and just as difficult to get rid of—Christ, he doesn’t shut the fuck up—so when called to it, he dispenses orders with open disdain. Hickey remains cheerfully unaffected.

He counts his blessings that he’s not obligated to spend altogether too much time around the man. Shared watches every few days; the occasional message run between him and Mr. Darlington, if there’s something that needs seeing to; keeping an eye on him when he’s standing sentry in front of officer’s country, to make sure the man doesn’t dart into a lieutenant’s cabin and start pawing through their drawers. Not that he’s been caught out doing anything of the sort yet, but in fifteen years of keeping order aboard Royal Navy ships Tozer’s learned how to smell a thief at a mile, and that man’s a cutpurse if he’s anything at all.

***

Sometimes keeping Mr. Hickey in line necessitates a bit of a display. The shouldering of his gun—the adjusting of his ammunition belt—the squaring of his boots on the deck, projecting the atmosphere of authority that had started coming natural to him around the time of his first promotion.

Hickey is always just about toeing the line of insubordination: even when the words coming out of his mouth are proper enough, Tozer can hear the disrespect seething beneath, and it makes him want to—well. It makes him want to do _something,_ only there’s nothing much to be done, other than give the orders he’s bound to give, and ensure Hickey knows the consequences if he disobeys.

When Hickey comes in from the morning’s mandated jog around the ice, where the ships are sleeping for the winter off the coast of Beechey Island, Tozer takes his time watching him strip his socks and prop his bare feet up in front of the galley stove. Then, just as Hickey's gotten comfortable, he strides up to him and orders him down to the hold, to help scrape mold off the pipes.

Hickey bristles. “Such unfair expectations. I’ve just now settled in.”

“You heard me, Mr. Hickey.” Tozer folds his arms and waits.

“Do I not deserve a moment of rest?” wheedles Hickey. “Am I not a man just as you are?”

“What you are is a stone in my boot, Mr. Hickey,” says Tozer, “a needle under my nail, and I’d appreciate you calling me _Sergeant.”_

Hickey only smiles.

***

There are hunting parties to be scheduled, when spring comes to Beechey, and Tozer is called in to the wardroom to receive the divisions from Lieutenant Little.

“I hope everything is to your satisfaction,” Little says, when he hands over the paper, covered in his strange scrawl. He always seems hopeful—as if hope were an acceptable substitute for confidence, in an officer. It might fool the men, but it doesn’t fool Tozer.

Tozer runs his eyes up and down the list and says, “Yes, sir.”

“Be careful out there,” Little says. With some effort, Tozer keeps his face clear of visible offense at such pitying condescension, and knuckles his forehead at Little before stepping out.

Back in the galley he steals a pencil from Tommy Armitage, always scratching away in his journal, and uses it to swap around some of the names. He puts Mr. Hickey in with Hedges, and brings in the cheerful Mr. Peglar in Hickey’s place.

“I’ll be a bloody Captain of the Marines, all commissioned and gold-laced, before I spend any time with Mr. Hickey than I have to,” Tozer grumbles.

Tommy looks up. “Sorry, what was that?”

“Nothing, Tommy. Here’s your pencil, then.”

***

He can’t resist a jibe, in the jollyboat on the way back from the graveside. “What took you so long down there, Mr. Hickey? Giving Young one last kiss?” Hickey ignores him. Tozer goes on, “Always thought the lad looked about one gale from keeling over, anyway. Only a matter of time.”

“He wasn’t your messmate, was he, Sergeant. Some respect wouldn’t go amiss. I knew that boy well.”

Tozer barks an astonished laugh. Playing the pious mourner, that’s a new one. “Come off it. You were just arguing we ought to have dropped him overboard!”

Hickey manages a careless shrug as he pulls ineffectively at the oars. “Just don’t see what makes a coffin and gravestone any more dignified than a shroud and the water. The Eskimaux will just come dig him up anyway, don’t think the seals would bother.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” says Tozer. “For when it’s your turn.”

“You think you’ll be there, when I die? Sergeant,” Hickey added, as an afterthought.

“I’m counting on it, Mr. Hickey. Now get to rowing, we’ve slowed down.”

***

A man’s allowed to change his tune, isn’t he? Based on new lessons learned. A soldier wouldn’t be worth his salt, if he couldn’t adapt to circumstances in the field.

 _Standing still is how you get shot down—_ is what Tozer repeats to himself, in the hours and days after Hickey’s lashing.

Where he saw chaos and disobedience in Mr. Hickey, before, he now sees spirit and intelligence. Where he saw the marks of a thief, he now sees a man capable of not only seeing but _doing_ what needs to be done.

He feels no guilt about his unpunished role in Hickey’s crusade. What matters is the safety of his men—if the Captain’s no longer able to perform his duties, no longer able to understand the way things truly are, then it falls to him to ensure it in any way he can.

A gift of tobacco hardly seems adequate, to make up for what the Captain did to Hickey. The poor man’s spirit had been broken as well as the skin on his backside.

So Tozer begins thinking about how else he might help. He knows what kind of man Hickey is, certainly. He can see the shape of the desires God has seen fit to give him, to set him apart from the rest. So it’s no great leap from that knowledge, to bring him to the threshold of a certain realm of fantasy, alone in his hammock in an emptied-out fo’c’sle.

Idly, at first; and then soon enough with intent: he imagines Hickey under him. Bent over a barrel, or in one of the emptied-out officer’s berths… Tight little cunny, he might have, hot and keen round Tozer’s prick; he'd rasp out Tozer's name, or just shake silently. Tozer would seal his new allegiance with the drag of his prick at Hickey’s fundament and with his mouth sucking a bruise at Hickey’s neck.

He comes off into his hand quicker than expected; harder, too, wrung out by his crisis as he hasn’t been in months. The wind batters the hull; the ship creaks; somewhere in the nearby dark Mr. Hickey is even now dreaming them a way out of this.

***

Playing cards with Hickey is like doing battle. His face is hardly impassive—always some new twitch of his whiskers, or a fresh twinkle in his eyes—but neither does it give a single damn thing away: Tozer, so good at reading his own men, the subtle shifts in their moods and needs, finds himself out to sea.

Usually he loses in spectacular fashion, but not tonight. He’s somehow found a run of good luck in the shuffle, and as the evening wears on he pulls even, and then ahead. The rest of the men who’d gathered around their table filter off to basin, hammock, and head, and by the time they reach the end of their series, they are just the two of them alone.

At last, Hickey sets his cards down, and folds. “You’ve gotten the best of me, Sergeant,” he says with an honest, sad air. “What’ll it be? I’ll have to owe you. A round of drinks at the finest tavern we can find in Honolulu harbor, then?”

“Surely that won’t be necessary,” says Tozer. “Got to be something you can give to me sooner.” He’s leering now, he can feel it on his face, but Hickey leers right back, and a familiar premonitory heat of triumph suffuses him.

“I think there is, now that you mention it.” Hickey jerks his head towards the companionway. “I’ve left it down in the hold. Accompany me?”

***

Once they’ve reached a far quiet corner, back near the dead room where nobody will disturb them, Tozer says, “Come on, then,” and puts a firm hand on Hickey’s shoulder, meaning to turn him round, have him up against the wall. “I’ll be careful of the wounds, you don’t have to worry.”

But Hickey doesn’t turn. He removes Tozer’s hand from his shoulder and just holds it there in his, staring at it as his expression flickers into amusement.

And then he looks at Tozer, and _laughs._ A sweet, chiming sound; amused as if Tozer has just told a most droll joke. “Oh. You’re not going to _fuck_ me, Sergeant Tozer.”

Anger swells up—a hot fast flooding rush that overflows before Tozer can cut it off at the source. He stumbles backwards, away from Hickey, and shoves his arms across his chest like a protective barrier. “Christ, Hickey, what the bloody hell are you playing at, then, bringing me down here? Some kind of joke?”

“Far from it.”

“Then—”

“You’ve just got it backwards, is all.” He approaches Tozer, starts gentling him like a misbehaving kitten, fingers of late containing a losing hand of cards—(had he lost on purpose? Tozer is only just now realizing)—running up Tozer’s sleeve, while he makes soothing noises, _tch tch tch._ “There, there—c’mon, now. I can make it feel good. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Trust me, eh?”

“Trust you!” hisses Tozer. “You’re trying to trick me into—into a buggering!”

“There’s no trick here. Tell me, how long’s it been since you were touched?” Hickey gazes up at him from his lowly vantage, brushes a hand ever so gently across the front of Tozer's trousers to punctuate his point.

Tozer’s mind howls at him to shove Hickey off; to spit at his feet for such disrespect; to back Hickey up against the bulkhead, with the bar of his forearm against his pale neck—but he can’t bring himself to. Instead he spits out a question, his tongue almost numb with the stupidity of it: “You don’t… you never… you haven’t ever… taken?”

“Don’t worry yourself with what I do,” says Hickey lightly. “This is about you. So do you want it or not? I can leave you, only here I was thinking you were dying for it.”

Deep in the storming core of Tozer’s flurried thoughts, there is only this: less pressing than the idea of being touched, to him, is the promise of an order.

What might it feel like to agree? To submit? He’d bossed Hickey about for years, and Hickey had always resisted, with the sort of insulting air that said _I know better than you,_ and Tozer had despised him for it, for the way it impugned his honor, his position, his responsibility.

But now Hickey’s easy confidence is an intoxicant, rather than an irritant. Better than Little’s doleful, naive optimism; far better than Crozier’s stumbling, belated directives—Hickey knows what he wants, and what he wants, right now, is Tozer. There is a purpose to be served.

“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Alright.”

He lets himself be handled—Hickey wants him over a crate, one that happens to be close by, at the perfect height, and he goes, staring down numbly at the wood grain, the slightly splintered cracks and whorls. Braced on his forearms, he sucks in a breath at the first brush of Hickey’s questing fingers. There’s something cold and wet coating them, god knows what or from whence it came, but Hickey is a resourceful man.

Tozer’s most private of places is circled slowly and then entered. “Don’t cry out,” hisses Hickey, “don’t make a sound,” and Tozer bites down on the inside of his mouth. He can take it, he tells himself. He’s a Royal Marine…

It goes on, until it stops, leaving Tozer oddly hollow. “Well?” he prompts, feeling like an idiot with his arse out and going cold, and he lifts his head to turn back and look.

In the lamplight Hickey’s there, fishing his prick out of his smalls, gazing down at what he’s done, what he’s about to do. A fondness there and a hunger too, if Tozer isn’t mistaken. His face burns and forces it forwards again, so Hickey doesn’t see his flush.

There’s a tap on his hip, a warning (how kind)—the press of Hickey’s prickhead at his hole—and then not the harsh thrust he was expecting but a slow invasion, a possession; gentle, almost, with one of Hickey’s hands resting soft on his lower back, stroking up and down.

And then—just like that—he’s being fucked, Hickey is fucking him, and it’s unlike anything he’s ever felt, the thief in the night taking from him this last secret, and he is offering it up willingly. There is desire, yes—the incurable desire of a chronic catamite—but there is also anger, as Hickey speeds his pace. Tozer receives the fury, feels it pour into him like liquor sparking warm down a dry throat, feels it bloat him even as he is stretched and filled by a man he once despised. Is it a new rage? Brought about by Crozier’s trespass? Or an old one, bubbling up from below?

Either way, he cannot deny that it feels good. There is a warm human body moving against him and into him, fast and rough now, and he is being held, and the ice feels just that much more distant. And it must be good for Hickey too, for he’s making all sorts of sounds, no words that Tozer can hear but little pleased noises, high and eager.

Tozer is soon lost in it, and awakens to himself only when Hickey leans down and pants wetly, “Nearly there,” his whiskers scratching at the shell of Tozer’s ear, “get yourself, then.”

His hand goes to his prick, heavy and neglected, and he has himself off with a few unstable tugs, splattering inelegantly against the crate. Hickey spends inside him with two, three last great heaving thrusts, only then at the very end gripping his hip hard enough to hurt.

After Hickey's pulled out, and Tozer hears him doing himself up, he staggers upright so he can do the same. He only realizes that there are tears streaking his face when Hickey lifts a hand up, as if to wipe them away. Tozer slaps it down, leaving Hickey looking mutely furious, his mouth starting to curl in a snarl.

“Go,” says Tozer thickly, “just—just go,” and he tries to make it sound like an order but it comes out as a plea. Hickey hesitates only a moment before bobbing his head in a parody of deference and brushes past him, towards the ladderway and then up out of sight.

He stands there waiting for something, he is not sure what. His buttons are all closed again—he is all covered up—but there is Hickey’s seed leaking from him slowly, and his eyes still burning, and many more ways he remains undone.

***

**Author's Note:**

> so maybe i wrote this solely to use the title once i realized nobody had done it before. WHAT OF IT
> 
> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


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